Gen. 1-3 reveals that Adam should have reigned as a consummate priest-king in God’s perfect image. His inability to perform such a task in the face of satanic trials and deception left open the necessity for another Adam figure to come and accomplish the first Adam’s commission….

..the devilish onslaught of deceptive trials that felled the first Adam in the first creation must be replicated in the end-time. This end-time Adam to come, therefore, must face the same storm of deception. But, unlike the first Adam, the eschatological Adam will withstand the attack and overcome the forces of evil. Likewise, his followers will be subject to this recapitulated tribulation of deception and will also overcome it through their identification with their latter-day leader, who paved the way for them.

It is no accident that our ancient foe first appears in Holy Scripture as a snake—imagery that follows the Devil all the way through the canon of Scripture to the closing vision of the Revelation of John. As philosopher Leon Kass puts it, “For the serpent is a mobile digestive tract that swallows its prey whole; in this sense the serpent stands for pure appetite.”1 Indeed he does—and the whole of Scripture and of Christian tradition warns the church against the way of the appetites, the way of consuming oneself to death.

We are commanded away from the path of Esau, who sells his inheritance for a pile of red stew (Heb. 12:16–17). We’re directed away from the god of the belly (Phil. 3:19). From the tree in the garden to the wilderness beyond the Jordan to the present hour, the people of God are tempted to turn their digestive or reproductive tracts away from the mystery of Christ and toward the self as God. Here the Spirit of the Christ and the spirit of the age are warring right now for your heart, for your soul, and for your stomach. And what we’ll have to decide is whether we’d rather be fed or fathered.

“The sheer animal force of temptation ought to remind us of something: the universe is demon haunted. It also ought to remind us there’s only one among us who has ever wrestled the demons and prevailed.”